Michele Bachmann explains why she is qualified to be president:
“I have a very broad, extensive background.
I’m a student of many years. I’ve studied a number of, a wide berth of topics. I sit currently on the Intelligence Committee. We deal with the classified secrets and with the unrest that’s occurring around the world. I also sit on Financial Services Committee.
But again, I’ve lived life.
Tomorrow, I’ll be celebrating my 55th birthday, and I’ve had a wide, extensive life. And again, my background is a very practical, solution-oriented vision.”
I’m not much interested in Bachmann’s presidential aspirations because I don’t take them seriously. But I am interested in the right’s bizarrely low expectations for what constitutes qualification for our highest offices. They gave us Dan Quayle. They gave us George W. Bush. They tried to give us Sarah Palin. I don’t want to sound elitist, but we should demand more experience than these candidates had when they served (or attempted to serve) as our top leaders.
Since Bachmann is talking about running for president, it’s natural to ask her what makes her qualified for the position. She did mention that she sits on the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees. Those positions do constitute relevant experience, although she’s only been serving on the Intelligence Committee for a couple of months. But the rest of her Palinesque response is meaningless. We have all lived life. We have all had experiences. Bachmann should have talked about what kinds of experiences she’s had that set her apart. For example, according to her Wikipedia entry, she worked for a time on a kibbutz in Israel. That’s a unique and unusual experience. She lived abroad in a much different culture. Inevitably, that provided her some important perspective that allows her to imagine different systems and different ways of doing things.
Bachmann could also talk about her multiple degrees, including law degrees from Oral Roberts University and William & Mary. She could talk about her time working as an attorney the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and why she quit to become a full-time mother.
I’m not saying that she’s qualified to be president, but she could make a stronger case than that she’s lived life, had experiences, and studied an unspecified number (berth) of topics. Maybe academic achievements and travel abroad don’t count as qualifications among the hard-right base of the Republican Party, but isn’t that the problem?
Sarah Palin probably had fewer credentials than Bachmann when she was tapped as McCain’s running mate. She had barely served as governor for a year; her formal education was less impressive; her knowledge of the larger world was inferior, and her familiarity with Washington DC and Congress was virtually non-existent.
I think the question we need to ask is, without being elitist about it, what are the minimum qualifications we should demand from a candidate for high office? It’s not an easy question to answer precisely. Some candidates suffer from too little familiarity with how Washington works, while others are too captured by the Washington mindset to think outside the box. But one thing that we have a right to ask is that candidates be uniquely superlative in some areas of life. They should be high achievers. They don’t need to have an Ivy League degree or be a highly successful CEO, but they should have excelled at something at some recent point in their life. Another thing we should ask is that they have a solid understanding of history and current events, including especially of foreign cultures, history, and events. Such experience can be academic or diplomatic or governmental or business-oriented, but it should exist.
I think people on the left automatically judge candidates by this kind of criteria without having to be self-conscious about it. But people on the right seem to be very suspicious of people with too much in the way of academic accomplishment, or who have traveled extensively and think other countries have something to teach us about our options for governing our own affairs. That’s probably why Bachmann didn’t have much to say in her own defense. The people who might be impressed by her degrees might look down on the colleges she attended rather than credit her for rising up from modest means to make something of herself. And her true base? They value her ordinary averageness, her stay-at-mom traditional values, and her anti-abortion activism, not her educational attainment.
I’m not immune from anti-elitist feelings. I criticized Obama for staffing his administration with almost exclusively Ivy League/Stanford/Berkeley graduates. Not everyone blossoms in high school and gets accepted to those kinds of universities. Not everyone can afford those kind of universities. I’d like to see more jobs for people who graduated from Michigan State or Rutgers or the University of Georgia. But anti-elitism shouldn’t extend to a celebration of low achievement. Our leaders should be very accomplished, intelligent people. You just couldn’t say that about Quayle, Bush, or Palin. The former two were just weaker knock-offs of their accomplished fathers who never took the life of the mind seriously. Palin just wasn’t qualified on any level. And Bachmann? Someone with her experience could be qualified, but it would help if they weren’t crazy.
There is no need to ask what qualifications are needed. The required qualifications are in the constitution.
People are free to vote or not vote for someone based on experience, but the qualifications are right there.
She meets them. For that matter, so do I.
nalbar
I encounter this same strange semantic argument time and time again. I don’t know how to explain it, but it is deeply puzzling.
The best analogy I can think of is if a company made a job offering and said that no one younger than 35 need apply. And then they listed qualifications they’d like to see, like managerial experience, computer proficiency, and a marketing degree.
Yes, anyone over thirty-five is qualified to apply, but only a small-subset has the requisite experience to get an interview and receive serious consideration.
I only care about “qualifications” in the latter sense of the word.
I hear the strange semantic ‘the government is a company’ argument time and time again. I don’t know how to explain it, but I find it deeply puzzling.
The best way I can explain it is that the government is not a company, it is not run the same way, and that presidents are not hired by a committee, but are elected.
The world would probably be a lot better off if companies were run like governments and company leaders were elected by their employees, and governments were run less like companies than they are.
nalbar
First, I agree with nalbar. Any analogy that starts with comparing a government to a corporation is a bad analogy – unless the government in question is a feudal monarchy, and even then the analogy is probably questionable.
Second – there’s a difference between “qualified to be President” and “qualified to be an effective President” or “qualified to be a good President”. Bachmann is certainly qualified to be President – she meets all the requirements for the job. She is certainly not qualified to be a good President.
But then, she’s not really any less qualified to be a good President than George W Bush was when he took office, considering that his executive experience was a joke and everyone knew it. So what exactly does “qualified to be a good President” have to do with anything, other than the personal choice an individual voter makes?
I don’t know that any other analogy exists. The people essentially ‘hire’ a president to run the executive branch of the federal government. There are some basic objective criteria that anyone wanting the job should be able to meet. The people should insist on these basic requirements. A lot of people should be considered as completely unqualified for the job, not in any legal sense, but in a practical sense.
The president is chosen to lead. Indeed, origin of the word is with the appointed or chosen leader of a province and dates to the 1300s. Person of authority means person who has the power to act on behalf of those who chose him–these actions are defined by the Constitution.
Also:
The HR reduction of this decision as expressed in the analogy is a big problem in the consideration we give the office.
I don’t really see any difference between a board of directors hiring a president and the people hiring a president. In the sense that there are some differences, it’s still the best available analogy and I don’t understand why people resist it. I also don’t understand why people insist on interpreting the word “qualifications” to have some legal meaning. If I meant to question Bachmann’s age and country of origin, I would do so directly.
Most people think of hiring in terms of what they go through. When is it that we get the opportunity to interview the candidate for office the way that an employer (or a board of directors does).
What is going on is more like the slates of officers presented to shareholders at board meetings. But at least we get multiple candidates, whose backgrounds we know little about, to choose from. And the marketing materials for the party slates is a little bit more expensive than the profiles of board candidates presented to shareholders.
She’s also 55 and still pretty hot in a MILF sort of way. That’s more than enough for a whole bunch out there.
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/media/sarah-palin-runners-world-flag-code.jpg
Well, unlike the rest of the bloggers and commenters, as of right now I have her in the top three contenders for the nomination.
People keep writing her off as beyond the pale in extremism, but her positions are no different than any other elected Republican at this point.
Well, she does excel at wingnutiness. Does that count?
It counts more than anything else. Most bloggers seem to think that there is some secret ‘reasonable’ candidate out there, and he/she will end up the choice. The problem I see is that there are no reasonable republicans at all.
nalbar
Didn’t she or her family receive (still receive?) large farm subsidies? So obviously she knows how the system works, how to game it for shat it’s worth. That offers a solid starting point for many initiatives which will flourish.
Yes, it does.
She attracts the media like a meadow pie attracts flies. And she leverages that media access to gain true believers. And that following inspires wingnut welfare donors to shell out the cash–already $2 million to her campaign.
Wingnuttiness is the competitive battleground for GOP politics in this era. And the success of the media barons and tycoons in winning elections for these manipulable folks has only encouraged the wingnut competition for outrageousness.
Since she’s female and from Minnesota, bets she picks Louis Goehmert for a running mate. If’n that’s the ticket, the Secret Service is going to have to stock up on longsleeved white coats with buckles in the back. Just to handle the campaign.
The right-wing rationale is the Hruska principle applied to the Presidency.
It can also be seen as repentance for electing the Marx-reading, anti-white, anti-Southern Abraham Lincoln and trying to save James Buchanan from being considered the worst President in history.
Asking for competence is not asking for elitists. But the voters, given honest information, generally can pick qualified Presidents. Vice-Presidents are a little dicier, but the Democrats since FDR have a better record on this score than the Republicans.
Nixon-Agnew-(skip Rockefeller, he was appointed)-Bush I-Quayle-Cheney. An honest consideration of qualifications for these folks as vice-president would probably have uncovered serious moral and intellectual issues. Only Agnew and Quayle seemed challenged in the competence department.
The GOP has long had its know nothing, narrow-minded, parochial and foreign-fearing wing, going back at least to the early part of the 20th C, especially their midwesterners and, later, western pols. So it’s no surprise that Quayle and Hruska — two of the dimmer bulbs the Repubs have produced in the past 40 yrs — both are out of the MW, Shrub from TX, and “amiable dunce” Reagan from IL/CA.
But as Hruska was intimating, Repubs care far more for ideology and the right outcome than intelligence, competence and proper process, which Dems are more focused on if imperfect at. And if Repubs have to cut some moral corners to achieve that outcome — as with Tricky, Spiro, Reagan (Oct Surprise, I-Contra), Shrub and many in today’s lying, law breaking GOP — well, that seems to be okay so long as you don’t get caught or fail to burn the tapes.
As for an honest investigation to folks to properly consider these people, my overall sense of it is the public hasn’t been nearly as well informed by our corp media about some of these pols as they should have been. Each time a group of GOP knuckleheads or crooks took office, it was following an election in which the MSM took a dive in covering them — 1968, 1980, 1988, 2000 — while their Dem opponents were gone over but good with a fine-toothed comb.
Booman,
I wonder if you can name some well-educated, intelligent, people with a broad and historically contextualized grasp of the nation and the world today, capable of a reasonably objective assessment of the challenges and the opportunities of our time.
I mean, among the Tea-Party wing of the GOP.
Duuuuude. Don’t lump Berkeley in with Stanford and the Ivies. State University systems are the solution for elitist private schools, not just another one of them.
Public Universities and those who attend them are definitely vastly different populations from private schools.
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